Note on the Cayman. By Charles Waterton, Esq.
My dear Sir,
The accompanying paper on the cayman by Charles Waterton, Esq., was sent me by that gentleman as one of several articles which I intend to appear in a second volume of 'Waterton's Essays on Natural History;' but as these will not be published for some time, and as the facts relating to the cayman are of immediate interest, I have Mr. Waterton's permission to send the article for publication in 4 The Zoologist,' reserving of course the copyright, with a view to a second volume of the Essays.
I remain, My dear Sir,
Yours, &c,
J.C. Loudon.
To the Editor of 'The Zoologist.'
The Cayman.
"The crocodile, in fact, is only dangerous when in the water. Upon land it is a slow-paced and even timid animal; so that an active boy armed with a small hatchet might easily dispatch one. There is no great prowess therefore required to ride on the back of a poor cayman after it has been secured or perhaps wounded; and a modern writer might well have spared the recital of his feats in this way upon the cayman of Guiana, had he not been influenced in this and numberless other instances, by the greatest possible love of the marvellous, and a constant propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction."—Extract from 'Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia.—Fishes.'—ii. 111.
Swainson,—wholesale dealer in closet-zoology, was never in the wilds of Guiana, where the book of 'Wanderings' was written. Hence any comment on the above extract were loss of labour and of time.
His erroneous account of the cayman at once shows me that he never saw this animal in its native haunts.
I stop not here to tell the world how I came to incur the hostility of this morbid and presumptuous man. Suffice it to say that formerly, in friendship (for I personally knew his worthy father), I used to give him ornithological information. But his behaviour was such that I found myself under the absolute necessity of discontinuing my correspondence with him: and this laid the foundation of that animosity which at last has induced him publicly to call in question my veracity,
